Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Early on in the President's term, I reacted to Donald Trump's economic agenda as follows: "Get that man a copy of Economics in One Lesson yesterday!"

Not to compare myself to Henry Hazlitt, but I now think he also needs to read an old PJ Mediaeditorial of mine on immigration. Apparently, the President really believes that his Obama-esque pen-and-phone plan to do away with birthright citizenship will (a) have legal force, and (b) solve the problems he attributes to immigration. I fortunately have no need to rebut the first, and have already argued against the second, in the last two paragraphs of that editorial (with minor updates):

The problem isn't that some people use "social programs." It's that we have "social programs" at all. (Image via Pixabay.)

[Trump] is wrong because [he] targets illegal immigration when the real problem is the existence of the welfare state. Immigrants did not start socialized education. Immigrants did not force law-abiding emergency care personnel to accept non-paying customers. Immigrants did not make it illegal for some of us to ingest chemicals that others disapprove of. Americans, forgetting that their government was established to protect the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, passed (and support) these laws. Americans chose to plunder each other's pockets and run each other's lives.

America has long benefited from freedom and immigration. She should re-embrace the former, not discourage the latter. Hard-working immigrants will appreciate this, while the lazy and shiftless will stay home.

That said, I am not sure that full citizenship should be acquired by the fact of birth. I am undecided on that matter, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it shouldn't be. Trump is choosing to address the problem by a means that further entrenches the awful precedent of the misuse of executive orders and further erodes the American political structure -- and he does so for the wrong reasons. Whatever differences should exist between the rights of full citizens (e.g., participating in elections) and individual rights (which our government should protect for all), use of "social services" shouldn't even be a consideration. That's because a proper government would not take from one person to give handouts to another in the first place.

It's the filthy bathwater of the entitlement state we should be throwing out, not the "anchor babies."